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Benevolence is not your typical princess and Princess Ben is certainly not your typical fairy tale. With her parents lost to unknown assassins, Princess Ben ends up under the thumb of the conniving Queen Sophia, who is intent on marrying her off to the first available specimen of imbecilic manhood.” Starved and miserable, locked in the castle’s highest tower, Ben stumbles upon a mysterious enchanted room. So begins her secret education in the magical arts: mastering an obstinate flying broomstick, furtively emptying the castle pantries, setting her hair on fire . . . But Ben’s private adventures are soon overwhelmed by a mortal threat facing the castle and indeed the entire country. Can Princess Ben save her kingdom from annihilation and herself from permanent enslavement?

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*Starred Review* In this new offering, the author of Dairy Queen (2006) and The Off-Season (2007) shifts from a contemporary Wisconsin setting to a magical, snowbound kingdom. Once again, though, Murdock’s protagonist is a winning, iconoclastic teen female. Princess Benevolence’s life is upended during a single afternoon’s tragedy: while visiting an ancestor’s grave, her uncle and her mother are killed, and her father disappears. Ben, now the kingdom’s heir, begins grueling lessons with her aunt Sophia, learning “myriad responsibilities and arts of royalty.” Just as her tutelage becomes unbearable, she discovers a hidden wizard’s room in the castle and begins teaching herself, using the enchanted spell books she finds there. Then tense negotiations to marry Ben to the sullen heir of a neighboring kingdom commence. Gathering her newfound magical knowledge, the princess flees the castle only to find grave dangers outside its walls. In delicious language that is both elevated and earthy, Murdock spins a rip-roaring yarn that borrows fairy-tale conventions (particularly from “Sleeping Beauty”) and reverses them to suit her strong, resourceful heroine. The wild adventure, intricately imagined setting, memorable characters, and romance will charm readers, especially fans of Gail Carson Levine’s Fairest (2006). Grades 8-11. --Gillian Engberg

More About the Author

Catherine Gilbert Murdock lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two brilliant, unicycling children, several cats, and a one-acre yard that she is slowly transforming into a wee but flourishing ecosystem.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I've read, loved, studied, and taught fairy tales all my life. Every three years I co-teach a graduate school fairy tale course and, since 1990, I've been doing a Cinderella unit with my fourth graders. So I'm always interested in new versions of these old tales as well as original ones. At the same time, because many of these come up short for me, I am a wary reader of them, especially those featuring feisty oppositional heroines who are too often pallid cousins of Gail Carson Levine's Ella and Patricia Wrede's Cimorene. So I was both curious and dubious as I started reading Catherine Murdock's Princess Ben. And here I am, after finishing it last night, having enjoyed it sufficiently to want to write about it at length.

So getting to the book itself, what was it that I liked so much? First of all, I was captivated immediately by the mannered writing style and voice. Murdock has really pulled off that old-fashioned first-person epistolary style and voice; it is very nicely done indeed. At first I was very conscious of this as I read (in a good way -- I was simply enjoying her sentences and vocabulary) , but once I got into the plot I stopped paying attention; I'm guessing she sustained it all the way through. For the last few years I've been listening to a lot of Dickens, Collins, and now Eliot so I'm very conscious of this old-fashioned style and it grates on me when writers try it unsuccessfully. So bravo to Murdock for pulling it off.

The characters are all very complex -- no one is totally bad or totally good; a very nice way of deepening and complicating the usual good/bad cast of characters in traditional fairy tales.Read more ›

Fans of Catherine Gilbert Murdock's previous books, Dairy Queen and its sequel, The Off Season , will be surprised and excited to discover that PRINCESS BEN is a tale in a completely different vein, yet equally enjoyable. This fantasy novel with fairy tale leanings is told by Princess Benevolence, who finds herself forced into becoming a "proper" princess after years of escaping the Queen's notice when the King is killed and his brother -- her father -- disappears.

At first Ben wants nothing more than to thwart Queen Sophia's every attempt to turn her into a lady, with the right manners and figure. She stumbles through dance classes, sneaks extra food whenever she can, and avoids all thought of her new position as heir to the throne. Locked during the night in a tower room, she finds a much more interesting way of passing the time when a secret passage leads her to a room of sorcery. Soon Ben is spending all her time learning spells, and half-sleeping through her days of lessons.

Ben's newfound contentment is disrupted when the threat of war looms. Thrown out into the world by the magical forces she still cannot completely control, she learns that there is some use for the skills the Queen tried to teach her after all. It will take all of her courage and determination to survive this challenge and become a true ruler.

Ben is a spirited narrator, and readers will love every minute they spend with her, from her somewhat spoiled beginnings to her later maturity.Read more ›

At first I was a little worried Princess Ben might turn out to be just another feisty princess story. All the ingredients are there: unconventional princess, arrogant prince, mean queen, locked tower, fire-breathing dragon, girl-disguised-in-boy's-clothing, magical prophecies - you know the drill. Fortunately this story kept me on my toes. Catherine Gilbert Murdock manages to take all the familiar fairy tale elements and turn them on their head.

Oh, and the voice! Ben has sardonically appealing wit, done in a style that sounds like it was written with a quill pen on parchment. She even sent me to the dictionary a time or two.

Finally, might I just add for the record that I LOVE it when an author does something completely different than what she's done before, and does it well?

In the author's attempt at eloquence, she uses such unnecessary flowery words, which painted no pictures or brought to mind no feelings. It was simply wordy for the sake of wordiness, and felt like the author had turned to her thesaurus at every sentence to see what extravagant turn of phrase she could create next.Because it is a coming of age tale, at the beginning the main character is not likable in the least. But by the end, she is not lovable, either.With a constant focus on food and her large weight, she suddenly has the realization that she's been eating for comfort, and not for sustenance. She instantly changes her ways, and food isn't mentioned again. Ridiculous. Eating disorders are never so easily conquered, and are perhaps too complicated a subject to be dissected in a book so short.The love story element was under-developed, and I felt that I cared little for either Ben or her Prince.The cute things I did appreciate, though, were the references made to fairy tales. The girl trades some "magic beans" for a cow, loses her shoe after a ball (by throwing it angrily at the prince), is stuck in a tall tower, and is laid under a spell to sleep.If the author had used fewer words trying to sound intelligent, and more words fleshing out her characters, I might have loved this book. As it was, I didn't hate it. But I barely liked it.